To regain the momentum in defending the 99%, there are three immediate areas OO should be focused on.
1) Protesting the rising price of gasoline. To all working class Americans, employed and unemployed, the gas prices are taking an immediate toll both in out-of-pocket expenses and in the rising cost of food and anything else you buy. In protesting the rises, as much attention should be paid to the banks as Chevron & Co. because it is widely recognized that bank/Wall Street speculation is driving the price escalation. Even while we offer and educate about sustainable alternatives and massive environmental bailout, we can’t stand by while people’s standard of living is cut even more.
2) defending public education in Oakland. The recent GA motion opposing the closures only begins to point at what’s needed. Public education is at a tipping point in Oakland: the percentage of students forced out, a 40% high school dropout rate, the increased and constant move to charterization and privatization, the outright destruction of the 25,000 student-strong Adult Education program, and the District administration’s present moves to destabilize Castlemont and Fremont High Schools and give the coup de grace to MacClymonds is being combined with a naked assault on the teachers’ union (OEA)., It’s contract is the only source of stability in the District, the only protection of teacher working conditions which are children and youth’s learning conditions. It had a settlement imposed on it by the present State-supported superintendant, Tony Smith, and Smith is determined to impose a new and qualitatively more destabilizing settlement this summer/fall. All of this means that public education as a right for every young person is in imminent danger of being destroyed. Education is being transformed into a privilege, once again limited only to the wealthy, with all the negative ramifications in race and class that entails.
Again, there is a direct need to link protests against the closures to a fight at the banks: OEA long ago demanded that Wells Fargo, a recipient of $50 billion in bailout money, use its huge financial and political clout to demand that the State forgive the $100million debt “owed” by the school District or that Wells Fargo itself pay off the school district debt.. The only way sufficient funds for public education in Oakland and the State will be found is if we redirect our attention to the banks around “they got bailed out, we got sold out” to put the demand for a bailout of public services squarely back on the agenda. Free, quality education for all, pre-k thru college or university.
3) organize the unorganized into unions. The logical follow-up to the Port shutdown actions in solidarity with ILWU longshore workers in Longview and with Port truckers up and down the coast should have been and should be an effort to build unions. Occupy should call on its members and supporters to build unions in their workplaces, starting new ones where none exist or joining and transforming existing ones, moving beyond the kind of class collaborationist policies we saw from the ILWU International and that we see from the state teachers’ union, CTA. Boots Riley recently suggested a fast food workers organizing drive. That’s an excellent place to begin. A massive popularly-led unionization drive would have an immediate impact in people’s lives. Previous struggles of this kind in the U.S. and in Europe have seen wages increase almost overnight by as much as 40%—a step toward the $20 an hour minimum wage that people need to survive.
These three areas of action can rejuvenate and reorient OO because each one of them speaks immediately to every day needs of the working class in this city and across the country and the world.
Bob Mandel,
involuntarily retired Oakland Adult Education teacher,
OEA
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